Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Mea Culpa

I have lost the comments to my last 3 posts, the ones starting my exploration of object oriented ontology and hyperobjects. I am sorry, especially for those who wrote extensive and thoughtful comments. All I know to do is tell you what I did and why and promise not to do it again.

Here's what happened: I moved my original blog Communications & Society to a new URL and renamed it, mostly for personal reasons. That blog was started in 2007 to support an interdisciplinary course I taught called—well—Communications and Society. That course is long gone, and the title no longer fits what I am writing, and I intend to do more things with my own domain. I made a mistake by merely redirecting the original blog to my new domain, which resulted in the blog losing all the comments to posts since 2007, more than 200 posts. By the time I was made aware of the loss of those past comments by an alert reader, I had 3 new posts with extensive comments linked to the new URL. I tried to correct my error this past weekend, but I quickly learned that I would lose either the 200 old sets of comments or the 3 new sets of comments. I couldn't keep both. I decided to keep the 200+ old sets and abandon the 3 new sets.

Of course, I'm embarrassed because I should know better, and I wasn't thoughtful. Rather, I was thinking about something else.

I have learned my lesson. I should not have redirected the URL of my old blog. Rather, I should have frozen it and created an entirely new blog attached to the new URL. I have done that now, but at the loss of 3 posts worth of fine comments. On this new blog, you will see a link to the old Communications & Society blog to the right, above the About Me block. There you will find all my old posts with the comments, all still pointing to the original URL. I hope all those comments prove worthy of the comments just made and lost.

I'll continue to research Google to see if I can still recover the comments to these 3 posts. As Frances Bell noted in one of the comments that I lost, those comments are still out there somewhere, and Google will make use of them someway. Maybe they will share that use with me. We'll see.

Again, I apologize, and I hope you will continue to trust me with your comments, time, and energy.

Writing is ephemeral on the web, right? That doesn't mean that losing thoughts isn't frustrating. I probably didn't even comment, Keith, but your willingness to explain and apologize to the writers shows a humanity within the technology.Kevin